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Book Review: A poetic and alluring adventure
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Doerr managed to set the war’s dark, cold and vile setting as a ‘normal’ environment for a coming-of-age story. (Shutterstock/-)
A
uthor Anthony Doerr takes us back to the pre-World War II era, telling the story of Marie Laure, a beautiful, freckled and blind French girl and Werner Pfennig, a genius German orphan boy with a penchant for technology.
The book tells the stories about the two children who grew up in contrasting environments in a parallel manner.
Marie Laure was the daughter of Daniel LeBlanc, the head locksmith in the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. She went blind when she was 6 years old and her father taught her to be independent by building a model of their neighborhood.
Shortly after she turned 12, Marie Laure and her father were forced to escape Paris under the instruction of the museum to protect a highly valuable diamond called the Sea of Flames. They moved to St. Malo to join Marie Laure’s uncle, Etienne.
In Zollverein, Germany, orphans Werner Pfennig and his sister, Jutta, grew up in an orphanage by the mines. Werner had a knack for science and technology and found radios enchanting; he was considered the ‘radio repairman’ when he was still a little boy. News of his brilliance soon reached Nazi officials who sent him to the National Political Institute.
The tale continues, individually unravelling the stories of Marie Laure and Werner, up to the point where their paths crossed. Side stories involve Werner’s friends, his relationship with his sister, Jutta, and Marie Laure’s discoveries in her uncle’s abode.
Doerr managed to set the war’s dark, cold and vile setting as a ‘normal’ environment for a coming-of-age story. Poetic and alluring, All the Lights We Cannot See might not be a page-turner for some, but a book better read at a slow pace to absorb all its literary aesthetics.
The moments building up to Marie Laure and Werner’s fate to cross are interlaced with intricate, gut-wrenching side stories. Doerr also offered his readers to experience being blind, with words carefully selected to describe the agony, as well as the unusually interesting adventures of not having the sense of sight.
From beginning to end, readers are transported into a world that existed within the last 100 years; however, it is totally foreign and enchanting and actually humanizes the terrible events happening within the period.
The book is listed in the New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books 2014 and was a finalist for the National Book Award.
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All the Lights We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Publisher: Scribner
530 pages
